There is no much point in setting a minimal file size to deflate

Nginx has an directive called gzip_min_length which you can use to instruct it to not bother trying to compress files under a certain size. I spent few hours searching for an apache equivalent setting just to realize

gzipping and deflating, while based on the same compression technology differs in the generate output, especially overhead. By the names of the settings it seems that deflate is the preferred compression on apache, which has also a gzip module, while nginx can only gzip.

For the cost of extra 5 bytes, deflate will send a file that it fails to compress just as it is. For small JS and CSS files, especially after minification, the likelihood of getting a smaller file by compressing it is small, so you will not end up wasting bandwidth instead of saving it unless you are really unlucky (since in the end data is sent in packets of 1k+ bytes in size). Still you waste some CPU cycles for even trying to compress, but since we are talking about small files it should not be too bad, but it would have been nice to have a method to signal apache not to bother (hopefully the compression code does it, but I don’t see any documentation for that).